Robinson Jeffers

Poet and Prophet

James Karman

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780804795500
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Literature

The precipitous cliffs, rolling headlands, and rocky inlets of the California coast come alive in the poetry of John Robinson Jeffers, an icon of the environmental movement. In this concise and accessible biography, Jeffers scholar James Karman reveals deep insights into this passionate and complex figure and establishes Jeffers as a leading American poet of prophetic vision.

In a move that would define his life's work, Jeffers' family relocated to California from Pennsylvania in 1903 when he was sixteen. While a graduate student at the University of Southern California he met Una Call Kuster, a student who was the wife of a prominent Los Angeles attorney, and they began a scandalous affair that made the front page of the Los Angeles Times. They eventually married and escaped to Carmel, California to write poetry; there they would spend the rest of their lives.

At the height of his popularity in the 1920s and 1930s, Jeffers became one of the few poets ever featured on the cover of Time magazine, and posthumously put on a U.S. postage stamp. Writing by kerosene lamp in a granite tower that he had built himself, his vivid and descriptive poetry of the coast evoked the difficulty and beauty of the wild and inspired photographers such as Edward Weston and Ansel Adams. He was known for long narrative blank verse that shook up the national literary scene, but in the 1940s his interest in the Greek classics led to several adaptations which were staged on Broadway to great success.

Inspiring later artists from Charles Bukowski to Czes?aw Mi?osz and even the Beach Boys, Robinson Jeffers' contribution to American letters is skillfully brought back out of the shadows of history in this compelling biography of a complex man of poetic genius who wrote so powerfully of the astonishing beauty of nature.

INDEX

Academy of American Poets, 143, 199

Adams, Ansel, 201

Aeschylus, 56–57, 148

“After Lake Leman” (Jeffers), 198–199

“Air-Raid Rehearsals” (Jeffers), 111

Akhmatova, Anna, Requiem, 169

Alpine Christ, The (Jeffers), 8, 42–44

Alpine Christ and Other Poems, The (Jeffers), 8

America and Americans, 6, 29, 77–78, 86, 89, 132, 137, 141, 160, 171; Arts and Crafts movement, 62–63; Gilded Age, 18–19; Great Depression, 65–66, 80–81, 93, 103, 121; Machine Age, 106–107, 138; New Deal, 103–104, 110; Roaring Twenties, 65–66; post-World War I, 39–40; post-World War II, 144, 172–173, 196–197

American Academy of Arts and Letters, 5, 143

Anderson, Judith, 2, 147–149, 153–154, 155–156, 175, 176, 177–178, 192–193, 199

“Animals” (Jeffers), 176

“Animula” (Jeffers), 189

“Answer, The” (Jeffers), 112–113, 200

“Antrim” (Jeffers), 133

Armitage, Merle, 194

Armory Show, 35

Arts and Crafts movement, 62–63, 68–69

“As the eye fails” (Jeffers), lines from, 210

Atkinson, Brooks, 177–178

“At night by candlelight. . . .” See “As the eye fails” (Jeffers)

atomic bombs. See nuclear weapons

At the Birth of an Age (Jeffers), 99–102

At the Fall of an Age (Jeffers), 94, 96, 97, 99

Auslander, Joseph, 131

Barkan, Hans and Phoebe, 68, 116

Barrias, Louis-Ernest, 109

Barton, Bruce, The Man Nobody Knows, 75

“Battle” (Jeffers), 135

“Beaks of Eagles, The” (Jeffers), 112

Be Angry at the Sun and Other Poems (Jeffers), 83, 134–137, 139

“Beautiful Captive, The” (Jeffers), 207, 208

“Beauty of Things, The” (Jeffers), 176, 185

Bednář, Kamil, 199, 200

Beginning and the End and Other Poems, The (Jeffers), 201–202

“Beginning of Decadence, The” (Jeffers), 150–151

Belle Époque, La, 19

Bender, Albert, 68, 83

Benét, Stephen Vincent, 131

Bennett, Melba Berry, 118, 119

Bentley, Eric, 194

“besides, I am used to it. . . .” See “It nearly cancels my fear of death” (Jeffers)

Bhagavad-Gita, 100

biblical references, 57, 75, 94, 100

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Introduction
• I. Wild honey
• II. Tides of fire
• III. The whirlwind’s heart
• IV. Eagle and hawk
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index